This book gives some practical info about user stories and the examples included can help you understand how to write good user stories. Despite my concern that it might be a bit outdated, I feel like I will refer back to the book from time to time.

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development is a decent introduction to user stories. The book could have benefitted from more depth on user stories and a little less breadth on adjoining topics. It is from 2004 and is starting to show its age.

The user story is a frequently used tool in agile software development methods such as eXtreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. It is used both for documenting the existence of a requirement and as a worm package for use in scope planning and scheduling. This is possible due to the incremental nature of agile methods. Work is decomposed into work packaged along user goal and contain all or at least most of the steps in the software development lifecycle. This in contrast with sequential methods where the work is decomposed by type instead.

User stories with the addition of conditions for satisfaction (high-level acceptance test cases) is the most important artefact in the communication between the customer team and development team. This interface is probably the hardest to get right in IT and being to able to write good user stories would be a great boon.

The book is from 2004 and is beginning to show its age. I think Cohn might have changed his mind on some things since then, for instance on the use of ideal days as the measure of a story point. Scrum no longer insists on 30-day sprints. The Wideband Delphi technique for estimating user stories described by Cohn is now usually referred to as planning poker.

The age becomes apparent in another way as well. For some reason Cohn writes a lot about subjects only tangentially related user stories. There are even introductions to both Scrum and eXtreme Programming in there. That might have made sense in a time where these were not as well known as they are today.

Despite this, the book is a decent introduction to user stories, what they are, how to write them and how to use them, complete with a case study. It is pretty short, not a bad thing per se, but it also tries to cover a great range of topics. This means there is not much space left to go into detail on the user stories themselves. I would have liked more both on developing roles and personas and on the "trawling" for user stories. As it is, anyone already familiar with agile methods will find them selves skipping big parts of the book.

As always with Cohn, the book is well written and easy to follow.

Mike Cohn, the author of this book, is an oft cited authority whenever the topic of user stories arises in Agile related discussions. Here he provides a very practical approach towards effectively using User Stories in the software development projects.
If you want to know anything about the User Stories, this is the GO-TO book !
Read the more details about this book at http://bookwormsrecos.blogspot.in/201...

It's been a long time since I read this but it was one of the first books I read about Agile, as a result kind of shaped my introduction - along with my ThoughtWorks colleagues. In particular, the first few chapters I read as narrative, but interacted with the rest more as a reference.

Written from an engineer's perspective, it provides a good overview of the Agile Methodology but an uninformed approach to requirements gathering / needs assessment.

Good reference point and insight for junior product managers.

Decent book on Agile development, a method for quickly making a lot of good features for software. The first book (Agile estimating & planning) was better however.

Good summary of agile and especially scrum and extreme engineering. I would have loved to see agile philosophy also covered into the book. How product managers do prior research before having a user story is also missing.

The book is easy to read and comprehend.

Lucidly written. Great way to wrap your head around the topic. Has a good amount of examples to help one understand the concepts and process well.

Book feels a bit dated with (now laughable) lines like "Most software projects will do best with a new release every two to six months. Certain website projects may release even more frequently" but nonetheless most of the content felt useful even in 2018.

Einzelne Kapitel für die Arbeit gelesen. Sehr hilfreiches Buch in einem verständlichen Stil. Im übrigens das einzige Buch betreffend User Stories und somit ein Muss für alle, die welche schreiben oder mit ihnen arbeiten müssen.

This book is a classic of Agile requirements gathering. Everyone involved in Agile software development should read it. Just skip the middle section about estimating and planning, and read Cohn's Agile Estimating and Planning instead. It's slightly newer, more in depth, and Cohn revises a few of his stances.

One of the best books I have read about Agile approach. Focusing on the User Stories as the center of the Agile methodology, it provides very useful and practical information; regarding how to write good stories, and how to use them as a reliable tool for estimation and planning.